At the time of my third chemo dose, I still had an easily identifiable lump: two conjoined lobes, fitting neatly under my index and middle fingers. Two peas in a little mutant pod. Since I started treatment, they’d gotten shallower, maybe. I didn’t feel the lump every day, because that way lies Panic, and the thing permanently at the top of my to-do list is ‘don’t feed the Panic.’ But I’d check my lump, and worry a little that it hadn’t shrunk more, and then I’d do my best to think of something else.

In the two weeks after my third dose, the lump has melted. That’s what it felt like. It seemed a little soft, and then one morning most of it was gone. Now it’s hard for me to find the exact spot at all.

This is an excellent thing, I’m assuming. But I actually felt worse the week the lump went away. Before, I could touch the cancer. I could say to myself, ‘here it is.’ An enclosed thing, a specific point of danger. Now I can’t point to where it is anymore. It could be anywhere. I keep touching the spot where it used to certainly be, but there’s no information to detect there.

All I know is that things are still changing. This is always the only hard truth, no matter what is happening to us and how we’re dealing with it. To be alive is to live with uncertainty, with the prospect of nebulous yet inevitable change.

That constant unknown is the closet under the stairs where anxiety grows itself, munching on spiders and old shoelaces and all the unwanted crap we shove down there into the black. When you live with a brain that’s trained itself for fear, it can feel like that’s all darkness is – a bottomless space of night terrors, of monsters cobbled out of our weaknesses and mistakes, the junk we want to throw away.

But darkness, that which is there but has no shape, is also the hideaway of hope. It’s where our dreams come from, our imagination. Certainty is a temporary comfort, but in the long run, it’s stagnation. Darkness gives us the freedom to create, to invent what we wish for. It gives us the freedom to keep moving. In darkness, we know that things can and do and will change.

It won’t be like this forever, we think, and we feel afraid because we know it’s true.

It won’t be like this forever, we say, and we know it means we’re alive, and that we’re not finished yet.